Tag Archives: Cusomizations

Last week I was looking to add the deployment of a local CentOS virtual machine to the Deploy Veeam SDDC Toolkit project so that it included the option to deploy and configure a local Linux Repository. This could then can be added to the Backup & Replication server. As part of the deployment I call the Terraform vSphere Provider to clone and configure the virtual machine from a pre loaded CentOS template.

As shown below, I am using the Terraform customization commands to configure VM name, domain details as well as network configuration.

In configuring the CentOS template i did my usual install of Open VM Tools. When the Terraform plan executes we applied the VM was cloned without issue, but it failed at the Guest Customizations part.

The error is pretty clear and to test the error and fix, I tried applying the plan without any VMware Tools installed. In fact without VMware Tools the VM will not finish the initial deployment after the clone and be deleted by Terraform. I next installed open-vm-tools but ended up with the same scenario of the plan failing and the VM not being deployed. For some reason it does not like this version of the package being deployed.

Next test was to deploy the open-vm-tools-deploypkg as described in this VMwareKB. Now the Terraform plan executed to the point of cloning the VM and setting up the desired VM hardware and virtual network port group settings but still failed on the custom IP and hostname components of the customisation. This time with a slightly different error.

The final requirement is to pre-install the perl package onto the template. This allows for the in guest customizations to take place together with VMware Tools. Once I added that to the template the Terraform Plan succeeded without issue.